Maybe Women Can Have It All—But Can Their Kids?

Editor's Note: This week, we are running a symposium on mothers and work, in response to the Wall Street Journal's recent article, "The Conservative Women Who Are 'Having It All.'" What does it mean to "have it all" when you are a married mother with young children like some of the women featured in the WSJ article? Is it even possible? And what do most married moms actually want went it comes to the ideal work-family arrangement? First up is journalist and mom, Maria Baer. Other respondents include Erica Komisar, Scott Yenor, and Brad Wilcox.

American women have been asking whether they can “have it all” for going on six decades. Second-wave feminism started it: the sales pitch was that women can and should build high-powered careers outside the home and raise happy, healthy kids at the same time—often with outside help. Because of these feminist roots, “having it all” has always had a liberal veneer—up until now. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported a twist: what if conservative women can have it all, too? And what if they’re better at it? 

Reporters profiled several successful young conservative moms, including 37-year-old May Mailman, mother of a three-year-old and senior policy strategist in Trump’s White House. Then there’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who reported to work four days after giving birth, and Senator Katie Britt (R-Ala.), Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and media personality Megyn Kelly. These conservative moms, we’re told, are ambitious, incredibly intelligent, and very stressed.

That was the end of the story. And that is the problem.

By definition, a woman’s attempt to have it all is a venture with multiple stakeholders. The most vulnerable stakeholders are, arguably, that woman’s children. Yet we seem to measure the outcomes without considering children at all. Why, whenever we set out to investigate whether women really can “have it all,” do we only ask whether she’s happy? Whether she has found professional success, or been promoted lately, or makes a lot of money? 

We should ask, instead, what our kids need and deserve. What is their “all,” and can they have it?

Research shows that kids, particularly when they’re very young, benefit from more, not less, time with their mother. As Jenet Erickson and Jay Belsky point out in these pages, recent findings from the NICHD Study of Early ChildCare and Youth Development (NICHD-SECC) suggest young children who enter child care apart from their moms are at increased risk of insecure infant-mother attachment, which can lead to emotional and behavioral disorders. More time in child care during the first two years of life correlates to negative social development, manifesting in more conflict with peers and adults as kids grow. 

By age 15, kids who spent more time in child care are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors (such as using drugs) and to experience conflicts with teachers. The findings are consistent even when controlling for the child’s sex, family income levels, and maternal education.

Research also shows that a mother’s nearness, attention and love has no analog. No matter how ‘loving’ the care, how focused the attention, or how good the intentions, it is simply not true that ‘any warm body’ will do in caring for a child. The NICHD-SECC results remained consistent even when controlling for the quality of the child care kids received. Even fathers, while vitally important to a child’s development and health, cannot replicate or replace the impact of a child’s biological mother.

There is no boss, no industry, no political administration or nation that needs a woman more than her children need her.

This subject is, understandably, fraught. Moms (like me) who are constantly battling the guilt and pressure of trying to do right by their children could read these statistics and weep. That may be why these studies are often ignored or qualified in the media — often researchers will affirm the risks for kids associated with moms who work during their early years, but then (rather bleakly) suggest that the positive economic impacts of mom’s extra income “neutralize” the negatives. 

Certainly, there are children of full-time working moms who grow up strong and healthy, just as there are children with moms who stay home who may experience deep challenges. Statistics are never individual guarantees. It is healthy for kids to see their moms pursuing other responsibilities and interests not directly related to them; and we shouldn’t give our kids everything they want all the time—even when they want us. It is also part of a mother’s job to model care for the wider world to her children.

And it is true that some moms must work—although moms in this position are among the last to suggest they are “having it all.” Polling consistently finds that most married mothers prefer to work part-time or not at all, particularly when they have young children. Last week The Washington Post reported that in the first six months of 2025, women ages 25 to 44 with young children at home are leaving the workforce at an accelerating rate, bringing the share of working moms in this age group to its lowest level in three years.

The Post reporters suggest these women are leaving their jobs because employers are reinstating pre-pandemic in-office policies, supporting the thesis that most moms want to stay home with their kids —or prefer more flexibility that allows remote work. In fact, more than half of conservative moms say their ideal would be to work part-time or not at all when they have kids under 18 at home.

In other words, even by woman-centric standards, “having it all” doesn’t seem to be full-time work for most mothers. 

Unfortunately, the progressive feminist line has been that if women can’t “have it all,” it’s not because the project is a losing battle against nature, but because everyone else won’t play along. Husbands won’t carry their weight, employers won’t make enough accommodations, or politicians won’t pass the right policies, which will force employers to make those accommodations. 

Some employers, of course, do. More companies are offering in-house day care. Most offices include a designated space for postpartum mothers to pump their breastmilk. Policies like these are often touted as “pro-woman.” But I can think of nothing more dystopian than a woman, sitting in some corner of a sterile office building, using a machine to pump breastmilk, which she will then have to refrigerate and, at some later hour, transport home for her baby. This cannot be our picture of a woman “having it all.” If anything, it is a picture of no one having anything they really want or need—an employer missing work time, an employee surely missing her baby, a baby desperately missing her mom. 

As a late-30s mother myself (who occasionally works!), I find the conversation about women “having it all” particularly tiresome—even when it’s women who share my ideology who are attempting the feat. Framing “having it all” as an economic project, with little consideration to what our kids need and deserve, is not only shortsighted. It implies that the selflessness of motherhood is somehow beneath us.

But there is no boss, no industry, no political administration or nation who needs a woman more than her children need her. We pursue high-powered careers because we want to make an impact, to leave a legacy, to be remembered, or to change the world. There is no surer way to accomplish each of these than by mothering our own children—a job which, by definition, no one else in human history can do. 

We can wring our hands over the special burden nature foists onto moms. We can call it unfair that kids need their moms more intensely and more often than they need anyone else in their first years of life; we can bemoan the “mental load” that dads refuse to share, and our employers refuse to accommodate, and society won’t thank us for. Or women could choose to see motherhood—even with all its exhaustion and pressure—as a privilege rather than a cross. What could be more personally gratifying than being, for at least a while, your most beloved’s entire world? What could be a better example to our kids than putting them before us?

Maria Baer is a freelance writer, reporter, and podcast host. She has written for Christianity Today, Breakpoint, and World magazine, among other publications.